[Michaelangelica]

New World Farming Began Around Same Time As Near East's

Mason Inman
for National Geographic News
June 28, 2007

People in the Americas began growing domesticated crops more than 10,000 years ago, according to a new study.

Ancient squash seeds, peanuts, and cotton balls found in the Peruvian Andes show that farming got started in the New World at about the same time that the first domesticated crops appeared in the Near East.




The new study, led by Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University, describes 10,200-year-old squash seeds found buried in the dirt floor of an ancient hut in Peru's Ñanchoc Valley.

Dillehay and colleagues also found 8,500-year-old peanut shells, the earliest evidence of peanuts as crops in the Americas.

Cotton fibers from the site—dated to about 6,000 years ago—are from about the same time that Egyptians began using cotton, Dillehay said.

The study will appear tomorrow in the journal Science.

Rapid Spread

The Ñanchoc Valley lies in the lower western slopes of the Andes mountain range in northern Peru (map of Peru).

Dillehay's team dug up the remains of plants and charcoal buried in the floors of ancient huts at several sites in the valley.

The team used radiocarbon dating—calibrated to correspond to calendar years—to determine the ages of these plants and were able to pin down each age to within a few hundred years.

People were growing the plants and hadn't simply harvested them from the wild, the research team says.

The remains were found far outside of their centers of origin, the researchers say, and looked different from known wild species.

New World Farming Began Around Same Time As Near East's

Ancient Canals in Andes Reveal Early Agriculture


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The new find suggests that agricultural settlements may have appeared in South America at about the same time they did in the Middle East. Dillehay notes that the earliest evidence of irrigation canals in Sumeria is between 7,000 and 8,000 years old.

The Peruvian canals were dug along the Ñanchoc River and drew water from small streams. The irrigation scheme suggests an agricultural system built on deliberate manipulation of the environment, rather than one dependent on planting and harvesting in naturally wet areas.


The canals appear to have been designed to draw water by gravitation toward planted fields at lower levels.

Social Reorganization

There is no evidence that a centralized bureaucracy built and maintained the structures, researchers say. But the canals' existence suggests they were built by an increasingly complex society with a mixed economy.

Such a community would have included not only hunters and gatherers but also people who survived partly or exclusively by producing their own food.

This meant not just a shift from foraging to food production, but a reorganization of society and significant changes in social roles.

Donald T. Rodbell, a professor of geology at Union College in Schenectady, New York, says the find raises another key question. "This is an interesting article, as it points to further evidence for a major [post-Ice Age] transition in the way societies lived in Peru," he said.

"This occurred at roughly the same time as a climatic reorganization that featured the onset of the modern frequency of the El Nino Southern Oscillation"—atmospheric weather changes tied to shifting Pacific Ocean currents—"which leads to the question of whether or not climatic change was the impetus for this important societal transition."

Researchers say population size increased with the building of the canals and that housing design shifted from circular to rectangular structures. Public rituals also increased, indicating communal cooperation.

Construction Details

The topmost canal, designated Canal 1 by the study authors, was made of rough stones and burned clay. Rocks line Canals 2 and 3 and the possible fourth canal. The stones appear to have been brought to the site from nearby hillsides.

Water deposited gravel and sand in Canals 2 and 3, which also contain charcoal that researchers dated.

Canal 1 is about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) long from its point of intake to its termination. Canals 2 and 3 are about half that length.

The canals' design, the study authors report, suggests that their builders were capable of measuring small slopes to control the flow and deliver constant amounts of water to their fields.

The Oldest Canals

Environmental data, the researchers say, suggests that the area was semitropical and that it underwent a period of increasing aridity between 8,000 and 5,000 years ago.

Accumulated sediments filled and eventually buried the older canals, and new ones were periodically built on top of them.

Canal 1 was apparently built during a period of increased rainfall, when surrounding streams carried water year round.

Because Canals 2 and 3 were abandoned at some point, researchers believe there must have been lengthy periods during which the site was uninhabited.

The Zaña Valley canals are the oldest ever found in South America and provide evidence that agricultural production was as important as marine foods in the early civilizations of the Peruvian coast.

Ancient Canals in Andes Reveal Early Agriculture

[Michaelangelica]

I just watched an interesting British show Time Team
which seemed somehow to have some TP resonances.
channel4.com - Time Team 2005 - Northborough, Peterborough

A Neolithic cathedral?

Huge circular cropmarks, visible only from the air, mark the existence of some intriguing archaeological remains in a field near Peterborough, on the edge of the Fens. Archaeologists believe the two concentric circles are what they call a causewayed enclosure, dating from the Neolithic era.

Large ditches mark out the circles, which could be as much as 6,000 years old – more than 2,000 years older than the main structures at Stonehenge. In the bottom of the ditches, which have been undisturbed by later human activity, there could be all sorts of finds – human and animal bones, pottery, waste and ritual offerings. Some archaeologists believe that these circles are enclosures connected with early farming activity; others believe that they represent some kind of religious or ritual sites.